The impact of automated planning aids on situation awareness and workload in the monitoring of uncrewed vehicles

Uncrewed vehicles (UVs) are pervasive in civilian and military operations. While automated systems are increasingly used to plan and implement UV routes, human operators remain employed to monitor the UVs. Good situational awareness (SA) allows operators to recognize the need for intervention. While autonomous planning systems can reduce an operator's workload, they may circumvent a critical opportunity to build SA resulting in poor monitoring performance. To evaluate whether route planning contributes to an operator's ability to monitor UVs, participants completed a virtual UV monitoring task with assistance from an automated route planning system. The system operated at three levels of automation (LOA) where the generation and selection functions were traded off between a human operator and an automated planning system (between groups). Once a route was determined, participants monitored the UVs as they traveled their outlined routes and intervened if the UVs were approaching an unsafe area. SA, situation assessment (visual attention), perceived workload, and performance were evaluated between the three levels of the automated system. Experience with the task, but not LOA, affected these variables indicating that the automation of UV route planning functions may not be detrimental to operator SA during monitoring.